Bellwether (2 page)

“Make sure you come back and get it as soon as you’re done with the mail,” I shouted after her down the hall. “It’s perishable,” I shouted, and then, remembering that illiteracy is a hot trend these days and
perishable
is a four-syllable word, “That means it’ll spoil.”

Her shaved head didn’t even turn, but one of the doors halfway down the hall opened, and Gina leaned out. “What did she do now?” she asked.

“Duct tape now qualifies as a personal errand,” I said.

Gina came down the hall. “Did you get one of these?” she said, handing me a blue flyer. It was a meeting announcement. Wednesday. Cafeteria. All HiTek staff, including R&D. “Flip was supposed to deliver one to every office,” she said.

“What’s the meeting about?”

“Management went to another seminar,” she said. “Which means a sensitivity exercise, a new acronym, and more paperwork for us. I think I’ll call in sick. Brittany’s birthday’s in two weeks, and I need to get the party decorations. What’s in these days in birthday parties? Circus? Wild West?”

“Power Rangers,” I said. “Do you think they might reorganize the departments?” The last seminar Management had gone to, they’d created Flip’s job as part of CRAM (Communications Reform Activation Management). Maybe this time they’d eliminate interdepartmental assistants, and I could go back to making my own copies, delivering my own messages, and fetching my own mail. All of which I was doing now.

“I
hate
the Power Rangers,” Gina said. “Explain to me how they ever got to be so popular.”

She went back to her lab, and I went back to work on my bobbed hair. It was easy to see how it had become popular. No long hair to put up with combs and pins and pompadour puffs, no having to wash it and wait a week for it to dry. The nurses who’d served in World War I had had to cut their hair off because of lice, and had liked the freedom and the lightness short hair gave them. And there were obvious advantages when it came to the other fads of the day: bicycling and lawn tennis.

So why hadn’t it become a fad in 1918? Why had it waited another four years and then suddenly, for no apparent reason, hit so big that barber shops were swamped and hairpin companies went bankrupt overnight? In 1921, hair-bobbing was still unusual enough to make front-page news and get women fired. By 1925, it was so common every graduation picture and advertisement and magazine illustration showed short hair, and the only hats being sold were bell-shaped cloches, which were too snug to fit over long hair. What had happened in the interim? What was the trigger?

I spent the rest of the day re-sorting the clippings. You’d think magazine pages from the 1920s would have turned yellowish and rough, but they hadn’t. They’d slid like eels out onto the tile floor, fanning out across and under each other, mixing with the newspaper clippings and obliterating their categories. Some of the paper clips had even come off.

I did the re-sorting on the floor. One of the lab tables was full of clippings about pogs that Flip was supposed to have taken to be copied and hadn’t, and the other one had all my jitterbug data on it. And neither one was big enough for the number of piles I needed, some of which overlapped: entire article devoted to hair-bobbing, reference within article devoted to flappers, pointed reference, casual reference, disapproving reference, humorous reference, shocked and horrified reference, illustration in advertisement, adoption by middle-aged women, adoption by children, adoption by the elderly, news items by date, news items by state, urban reference, rural reference, disparaging reference, reference indicating complete acceptance, first signs of waning of fad, fad declared over.

By 4:55 the floor of my whole lab was covered with piles and Flip still wasn’t back. Stepping carefully among the piles, I went over and looked at the box again. Biology was clear on the other side of the complex, but there was nothing for it. The box said PERISHABLE, and even though irresponsibility is the hottest trend of the nineties, it hasn’t worked its way through the whole society yet. I picked up the box and took it down to Dr. Turnbull.

It weighed a ton. By the time I’d maneuvered it down two flights and along four corridors, the reasons why irresponsibility had caught on had become very clear to me. At least I was getting to see a part of the building I ordinarily was never in. I wasn’t even exactly sure where Bio was except that it was down on the ground floor. But I must be heading in the right direction. There was moisture in the air and a faint sound of zoo. I followed the sound down yet another staircase and into a long corridor. Dr. Turnbull’s office was, of course, at the very end of it.

The door was shut. I shifted the box in my arms, knocked and waited. No answer. I shifted the box again, propping it against the wall with my hip, and tried the knob. The door was locked.

The last thing I wanted to do was lug this box all the way back up to my office and then try to find a refrigerator. I looked down the hall at the line of doors. They were all closed, and, presumably, locked, but there was a line of light under the middle one on the left.

I repositioned the box, which was getting heavier by the minute, lugged it down to the light, and knocked on the door. No answer, but when I tried the knob, the door opened onto a jungle of video cameras, computer equipment, opened boxes, and trailing wires.

“Hello,” I said. “Anybody here?”

There was a muffled grunt, which I hoped wasn’t from an inmate of the zoo. I glanced at the nameplate on the door. “Dr. O’Reilly?” I said.

“Yeah?” a man’s voice from under what looked like a furnace said.

I walked around to the side of it and could see two brown corduroy legs sticking out from under it, surrounded by a litter of tools. “I’ve got a box here for Dr. Turnbull,” I said to the legs. “She’s not in her office. Could you take it for her?”

“Just set it down,” the voice said impatiently.

I looked around for somewhere to set it that wasn’t covered with video equipment and coils of chicken wire.

“Not on the equipment,” the legs said sharply. “On the floor.
Carefully.”

I pushed aside a rope and two modems and set the box down. I squatted down next to the legs and said, “It’s marked ‘perishable.’ You need to put it in the refrigerator.”

“All
right,”
he snapped. A freckled arm in a wrinkled white sleeve appeared, patting the floor around the base of the box.

There was a roll of duct tape lying just out of his reach. “Duct tape?” I said, putting it in his hand.

His hand closed around it and then just stayed there.

“You didn’t want the duct tape?” I looked around to see what else he might have wanted. “Pliers? Phillips screwdriver?”

The legs and arm disappeared under the furnace and a head emerged from behind it “Sorry,” he said. His face was freckled, too, and he was wearing Coke-bottle-thick glasses. “I thought you were that mail person.”

“Flip,” I said. “No. She delivered the box to my office by mistake.”

“Figures.” He pulled himself out from under the furnace and stood up. “I really
am
sorry,” he said, dusting himself off. “I don’t usually act that rude to people who are trying to deliver things. It’s just that Flip …”

“I know,” I said, nodding sympathetically.

He pushed his hand through his sandy hair. “The last time she delivered a box to me she set it on top of one of the monitors, and it fell off and broke a video camera.”

“That sounds like Flip,” I said, but I wasn’t really listening. I was looking at him.

When you spend as much time as I do analyzing fads and fashions, you get so you can spot them at first sight: ecohippie, jogger, Wall Street M.B.A., urban terrorist. Dr. O’Reilly wasn’t any of them. He was about my age and about my height. He was wearing a lab coat and corduroy pants that had been washed so often the wale was completely worn off on the knees. They’d shrunk, too, halfway up his ankles, and there was a pale line where they’d been let down.

The effect, especially with the Coke-bottle glasses, should have been science geek, but it wasn’t. For one thing, there were the freckles. For another, he was wearing a pair of once-white canvas sneakers with holes in the toes and frayed seams. Science geeks wear black shoes and white socks. He wasn’t even wearing a pocket protector, though he should have been. There were two splotches of ballpoint ink and a puddle of Magic Marker on the breast pocket of the lab coat, and one of the patch pockets was out at the bottom. And there was something else, something I couldn’t put my finger on, that made it impossible for me to categorize him.

I squinted at him, trying to figure out exactly what it was, so long he looked at me curiously. “I took the box to Dr. Turnbull’s office,” I said hastily, “but she’s gone home.”

“She had a grant meeting today,” he said. “She’s very good at getting grants.”

“The most important quality for a scientist these days,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling wryly. “Wish I had it”

“I’m Sandra Foster,” I said, sticking out my hand. “Sociology.”

He wiped his hand on his corduroys and shook my hand. “Bennett O’Reilly.”

And that was odd, too. He was my age. His name should be Matt or Mike or, God forbid, Troy. Bennett.

I was staring again. I said, “And you’re a biologist?”

“Chaos theory.”

“Isn’t that an oxymoron?” I said.

He grinned. “The way I did it, yes. Which is why my project lost its funding and I had to come to work for HiTek.”

Maybe that accounted for the oddness, and corduroys and canvas sneakers were what chaos theorists were wearing these days. No, Dr. Applegate, over in Chem, had been in chaos, and he dressed like everybody else in R&D: flannel shirt, baseball cap, jeans, Nikes.

And nearly everybody at HiTek’s working out of their field. Science has its fads and crazes, like anything else: string theory, eugenics, mesmerism. Chaos theory had been big for a couple of years, in spite of Utah and cold fusion, or maybe because of it, but both of them had been replaced by genetic engineering. If Dr. O’Reilly wanted grant money, he needed to give up chaos and build a better mouse.

He was stooping over the box. “I don’t have a refrigerator. I’ll have to set it outside on the porch.” He picked it up, grunting a little. “Jeez, it’s heavy. Flip probably delivered it to you on purpose so she wouldn’t have to carry it all the way down here.” He boosted it up with his corduroy knee. “Well, on behalf of Dr. Turnbull and all of Flip’s other victims, thanks,” he said, and headed into the tangle of equipment.

A clear exit line, and, speaking of grants, I still had half those hair-bobbing clippings to sort into piles before I went home. But I was still trying to put my finger on what it was that was so unusual about him. I followed him through the maze of stuff.

“Is Flip responsible for this?” I said, squeezing between two stacks of boxes.

“No,” he said. “I’m setting up my new project.” He stepped over a tangle of cords.

“Which is?” I brushed aside a hanging plastic net.

“Information diffusion.” He opened a door and stepped outside onto a porch. “It should keep cold enough out here,” he said, setting it down.

“Definitely,” I said, hugging my arms against a chilly October wind. The porch faced a large, enclosed paddock, fenced in on all sides by high walls and overhead with wire netting. There was a gate at the back.

“It’s used for large-animal experiments,” Dr. O’Reilly said. “I’d hoped I’d have the monkeys by July so they could be outside, but the paperwork’s taken longer than I expected.”

“Monkeys?”

“The project’s studying information diffusion patterns in a troop of macaques. You teach a new skill to one of the macaques and then document its spread through the troop. I’m working with the rate of utilitarian versus nonutilitarian skills. I teach one of the macaques a nonutilitarian skill with a low ability threshold and multiple skill levels—”

“Like the Hula Hoop,” I said.

He set the box down just outside the door and stood up. “The Hula Hoop?”

“The Hula Hoop, miniature golf, the twist. All fads have a low ability threshold. That’s why you never see speed chess becoming a fad. Or fencing.”

He pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up on his nose.

“I’m working on a project on fads. What causes them and where they come from,” I said.

“Where do they come from?”

“I have no idea. And if I don’t get back to work, I never will.” I stuck out my hand again. “Nice to have met you, Dr. O’Reilly.” I started back through the maze.

He followed me, saying thoughtfully, “I never thought of teaching them to do a Hula Hoop.”

I was going to say I didn’t think there’d be room in here, but it was almost six, and I at least had to get my piles up off the floor and into file folders before I went home.

I told Dr. O’Reilly goodbye and went back up to Sociology. Flip was standing in the hall, her hands on the hips of her leather skirt.

“I
came
back and you’d
left”
she said, making it sound like I’d left her sinking in quicksand. “I was down in Bio,” I said.

“I had to come all the way back from Personnel,” she said, tossing her hair. “You
said
to come back.”

“I gave up on you and delivered the package myself,” I said, waiting for her to protest and say delivering the mail was her job. I should have known better. That would have meant admitting she was actually responsible for something.

“I looked all over your office for it,” she said virtuously. “While I was waiting for you, I picked up all that stuff you left on the floor and threw it in the trash.”

the old curiosity shop (1840—41)—–
Book fad caused by serialization of Dickens’s story about a little girl and her hapless grandfather, who are thrown out of their shop and forced to wander through England. Interest in the book was so great that people in America thronged the pier waiting for the ship from England to bring the next installment and, unable to wait for the ship to dock, shouted to the passengers aboard, “Did Little Nell die?” She did, and her death reduced readers of all ages, sexes, and degrees of toughness to agonies of grief. Cowboys and miners in the West sobbed openly over the last pages and an Irish member of Parliament threw the book out of a train and burst into tears.